Here are 100 books that Love Lies Bleeding fans have personally recommended if you like
Love Lies Bleeding.
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My whole family shared a love for classic British mysteries, especially light-hearted, witty ones. With the enduring popularity of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, people sometimes forget there were lots of other great writers from the “golden age” of mysteries. I first found most of these books on my parents’ bookshelves when I was a bored teenager growing up in snowy central Maine. Several of the paperbacks were so well-worn the cellophane was peeling off their covers. For me, reading classic mysteries is like listening to Mozart—they are endlessly stirring and fascinating, and in the end, order is restored, and all is right with the world.
This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.
Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.
_________________________ Josephine Tey's classic novel about Richard III, the hunchback king whose skeleton was famously discovered in a council car park, investigates his role in the death of his nephews, the princes in the Tower, and his own death at the Battle of Bosworth.
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be the…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
My whole family shared a love for classic British mysteries, especially light-hearted, witty ones. With the enduring popularity of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, people sometimes forget there were lots of other great writers from the “golden age” of mysteries. I first found most of these books on my parents’ bookshelves when I was a bored teenager growing up in snowy central Maine. Several of the paperbacks were so well-worn the cellophane was peeling off their covers. For me, reading classic mysteries is like listening to Mozart—they are endlessly stirring and fascinating, and in the end, order is restored, and all is right with the world.
I love the setting of this mystery: New Zealand during World War II. Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander, but most of her well-known mysteries are set in England. This one has fascinating Māori characters as well as the usual blustery English ones.
Add a Nazi spy and our intrepid Inspector Roderick Alleyn in disguise, a complex plot, plus a truly surprising ending, and you’ve got a recipe for exactly the kind of mystery I like to escape into.
Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand's North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel.
It was a horrible death - Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die.
Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised or the Maoris he'd insulted. Even the spies he'd thwarted - if he wasn't a spy himself...
My whole family shared a love for classic British mysteries, especially light-hearted, witty ones. With the enduring popularity of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, people sometimes forget there were lots of other great writers from the “golden age” of mysteries. I first found most of these books on my parents’ bookshelves when I was a bored teenager growing up in snowy central Maine. Several of the paperbacks were so well-worn the cellophane was peeling off their covers. For me, reading classic mysteries is like listening to Mozart—they are endlessly stirring and fascinating, and in the end, order is restored, and all is right with the world.
This book introduces one of my favorite sleuths, Albert Campion. But what’s fun is that Allingham never tells the story from Campion’s point of view.
We only see him from the outside, as others do. This adds to the fun and intrigue. And there’s lots of that. In a spooky old English country mansion full of strangers, the host is murdered, and the rest of the crew goes on a twisty, scary roller-coaster ride driven by an assortment of secrets and criminal schemes—which we must slowly figure out.
This one had me on the edge of my chair, wondering what outrageous turn the plot would take next.
Classic Crime from the Golden Age, the first in the Albert Campion Series. Margery Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author.
George Abbershaw is set for a social weekend at Black Dudley manor, hosted by Wyatt Petrie and his elderly uncle Colonel Combe, who enjoys the company of Bright Young Things. With Meggie Oliphant in attendance, George looks forward to the chance of getting closer to the girl he's set his heart on. But when murder spoils the party, the group soon find out that not only is there a killer in their midst, but the house is under…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
My whole family shared a love for classic British mysteries, especially light-hearted, witty ones. With the enduring popularity of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, people sometimes forget there were lots of other great writers from the “golden age” of mysteries. I first found most of these books on my parents’ bookshelves when I was a bored teenager growing up in snowy central Maine. Several of the paperbacks were so well-worn the cellophane was peeling off their covers. For me, reading classic mysteries is like listening to Mozart—they are endlessly stirring and fascinating, and in the end, order is restored, and all is right with the world.
One of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Set in Paris in the 1920s, this mystery has everything I want in an escapist read: a suave detective, his sharpshooting, bad-ass girlfriend, a twisty, unpredictable plot, and fabulous, quirky characters.
Many are based on icons of the era: Josephine Baker, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and all the usual Midnight in Paris celebrities. I first read this in my teens, and I still reread it for the madcap humor and view of Paris in the 1920s written by someone who was there.
"It has the delicious irresponsibility of a Wodehouse plot. . . . It's one of the funniest books we've read in a long time. It contains a great deal of shrewd satire."—The New York Times Multimillionaire and philanthropist Hugo Weiss is known in every capital of the Western world as a munificent patron of the arts. When Weiss suddenly vanishes while on a visit to Paris, his disappearance sets the stage for this uncommonly witty and urbane mystery. Homer Evans, an intrepid American detective, turns his keen intellect and remarkable intuition toward solving the puzzle of the financier's disappearance. Assisted…
Hoffs is one of the founding members of The Bangles, and one can’t help but imagine that it is all true in one way or another. There’s a character who is an awful lot like Prince and...well, that makes the story particularly fun for me.
A delightfully funny and romantic debut novel from Susanna Hoffs, the celebrated performer and co-founder of The Bangles
'A little bit romance, a little bit rock-and-roll-this isn't just a book, it's a love song, and it should come as no surprise that Susanna Hoffs has crafted the perfect one to put on your playlist.' Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners
'...the smart, ferocious rock-chick redemption romance you didn't know you needed' New York Times
Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song-written by world-famous superstar Jonesy-but Jane hasn't…
I came of age in Oklahoma as a gay youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, keeping myself hidden out of safety and shame. Once I was old enough to leave my small-minded town and be myself, I crashed headlong into the oncoming AIDS epidemic. It set me on a path to understanding the world and my place in it as a homosexual. I turned to reading about the lives and histories of those who came before me, to learn about their deaths and survivals in what could be an ugly, brutal world. These works continue to draw me, haunt me, and inspire me to share my story through my writing.
The quiet endurance of grief. I love this small, meditative novella that captures the essence of grief as it continues to linger in the body, the mind, and the heart long past the comfortability of those around you.
While the story focuses on the main character, an aging, gay professor who has come to Washington, DC, for a visiting professorship after losing his mother to a long illness, each person encountered is grieving something in their own way (I truly love that Holleran mirrors the main character’s grief with that of Mary Todd Lincoln’s after losing her husband to an assassin but also still grieving the death of her son via a biography he’s reading).
What I find so beautiful about this book is that Holleran doesn’t go for the theatrics of grief. He keeps the story and the emotions calm, methodic, and persistent with such great care to craft…
In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a beautiful novel destined to become a classic
Reeling from the recent death of his invalid mother, a worn, jaded professor comes to our nation's capital to recuperate from his loss. What he finds there--in his repressed, lonely landlord, in the city's mood and architecture, and in the letters and journals of Mary Todd Lincoln--shows him new, poignant truths about America, yearning, loneliness, and mourning itself.
Since Andrew Holleran first burst onto the scene with 1978's groundbreaking Dancer from the Dance, which has been continuously in print, he has been dazzling readers…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am passionate about exploring consciousness using psychedelics, meditation, and the dreamscape because it leads us toward our greatest human potential. Psychedelics have been my main tool for exploring consciousness, and I want to share how they can be safely used to access our greatest psychic gifts and, in particular, to lovingly share consciousness telepathically with others to explore the infinite living cosmos together.
This book chronicles the heroic journey of Christopher Bache’s 73 high-dose LSD sessions over twenty years and how these sessions impacted his life.
His story was a testament to me of the incredible hard work and persistence required to clear the body of energetic blockages when using psychedelics to reach the highest states of consciousness, including tapping into the cosmic creative principle of the living universe, exploring hell and heavenly realms, and nonduality. I loved how compelling and inspiring Bache’s story is.
A professor of religious studies meticulously documents his insights from 73 high-dose LSD sessions conducted over the course of 20 years
* Chronicles, with unprecedented rigor, the author's systematic journey into a unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence
* Makes a powerful case for the value of psychedelically induced spiritual experience and discusses the challenge of integrating these experiences into everyday life
* Shows how psychedelic experience can take you beyond self-transformation into collective transformation and help birth the future of humanity
On November 24, 1979, Christopher M. Bache took the first step on what would become…
I’m a professor myself who writes novels, so am especially drawn to novels about campus life! I really do value the life of the mind, but am also aware of just how strange a life that is within contemporary culture. At the same time, campuses are hotbeds of ideas, ranging from the deep and the true to the shallow and the crazy, and young passionate impressionable students simmer in those ideas for several years and then go on to shape our future. What could be more important than novels which bring all that to light?
And then there was Campusland… Fast, funny, and brutal in its satirical account of today’s campuses, with their “safe spaces” and identity politics and administrators and students alike running amok, this is a book with an agenda (be forewarned) but which executes that agenda extremely well. Johnston really nails certain character types present on many liberal arts colleges and elite campuses, as well as the dynamics as those characters execute their own agendas. If you share the author’s agenda you will lap it up; if not, you will be enraged; but either way you will be entertained. And if you haven’t been paying attention to the campus scene for a while—prepare to be shocked.
Eph Russell is an English professor up for tenure. He may look and sound privileged, but Eph is right out of gun-rack, Bible-thumping rural Alabama. His beloved Devon, though, has become a place of warring tribes, and there are landmines waiting for Eph that he is unequipped to see. The cultural rules are changing fast.
Lulu Harris is an entitled freshman - er, first year - from Manhattan. Her singular ambition is to be a prominent socialite - an "It Girl." While most would kill for a place at Devon, to her college is a dreary impediment. She is pleasantly…
Much laughter is born out of sadness. Humor can be a way to cope or even reinvent our realities in ways that bring relief—and release. There's a misconception that “serious literature” should be humorless; crack a smile and you’re a fraud. However, the worlds and characters that emerge from this way of thinking do not ring true to me. Who among us hasn’t joked to help deal with sorrow? Or to satirize the outrageous? Or simply because life--however brutal—is also sometimes funny? The more a writer allows laughter to intermingle with tears, the more I believe in the story, and the more I enjoy it. That is why I wrote a “funny-sad” novel, The Australian.
Abbott Awaits follows the spectacularly ordinary life of a father with a two-year-old; husband to an insomniac, pregnant wife; and university teacher. Bachelder evokes beauty in the mundane, dazzling splendor in domestic tedium, and in the middle of cleaning up his daughter’s vomited-up raspberries, a revelation that gets to the heart of Abbot’s heart-crushing yet devastatingly funny tour of his wildly imaginative inner life: “The following propositions are both true: A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but B) Abbot cannot stand his life.”
A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.
In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
For me, writing fiction is a way of tackling issues of fate and identity through storytelling. I believe we’re each the result of an intersection between personality and history and I’m interested in the way our time and place impacts us and creates a backdrop for our lives. My first novel, The Wayward Moon, is historical fiction set in the 9th-century Middle East. My second novel follows a Jewish family back six generations to Belarus. But no matter what period I’m writing about, the most important thing is always to tell a good story.
Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).
Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.
Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.
From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family
Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?
Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high…
